Friday, 22 June 2018

Why 5%? The sugar guidelines revisited

Earlier this week I suggested that the ‘extremely worrying’ news
that children are eating twice as much sugar as the government
recommends might have something to do with the government halving the
recommendation. The change was made in 2015 based on advice given by the
Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) as part of its evidence review of carbohydrates.
It recommended that people consume no more than five per cent of their
calories from ‘free sugars’ (which includes sugar in honey and fruit
juice). This was a significant change to the previous advice to consume
no more than ten per cent of calories from ‘non-milk extrinsic sugars’
(which excludes honey and fruit juice).

In calorie terms, this implies daily limits of around 100 calories,
down from the previous 200 calories. In layman’s terms, this means five
or six sugar cubes for children under the age of 11 and seven sugar
cubes for adults. The new guidelines are the lowest in the world and
have been a boon for Action on Sugar who have issued press release after press release complaining that various everyday food products contain more than a day’s sugar.

The implication is that there is something inherently unsafe about
consuming more than 30 grams of sugar in a day, but what? What harm will
come to a 10 year old who consumes the recommended 2,000 calories a day
but gets 200 of those from sugar rather than the recommended 100? Given
that Britain’s food supply is being taxed, regulated and reformulated
on the pretext of meeting this target, this is a question that should be
asked more often. The answer, incredibly, is ‘nothing’.

About Me

Writer and researcher at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Blogging in a personal capacity.
Author of Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism (2015), The Art of Suppression (2011), The Spirit Level Delusion (2010) and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (2009).

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."